Sir Fergus Montgomery, who has died aged 85, was one of the few MPs to have
represented three seats in different parts of England: Newcastle East,
Brierley Hill and Altrincham and Sale.

Serving 33 years in the Commons between 1959 and 1997 (and twice losing his seat), Montgomery was instrumental in Margaret Thatcher’s election as Conservative leader in 1975. But though he was twice her Parliamentary Private Secretary before she came to power, he did not feature in her government.

A schoolmaster turned management consultant, Montgomery was on the Right of his party, though an opponent of corporal punishment. He vigorously championed the interests of, in turn, Tyneside, the Black Country and Greater Manchester, and was an habitué of the North American lecture circuit.

William Fergus Montgomery was born on Tyneside on November 25 1927 and educated at Jarrow Grammar School. He went up to Bede College, Durham, in 1948 after service with the Royal Navy, then taught in the east end of Newcastle.

In 1950 he became the youngest ever member of Hebburn council, and its only Tory, staying on for eight years. He became national vice-chairman of the Young Conservatives in 1954, and the following year fought the Labour stronghold of Consett.

Montgomery was elected national chairman of the YCs in 1957, defeating his future colleague Marcus Kimball; much was made of a Jarrow boy defeating a fox-hunting Old Etonian landowner. His successor was another meritocrat, Peter Walker.

Adopted for Newcastle East, Montgomery worked the constituency hard. In 1959, aided by a swing to the Conservatives and slum clearance which moved out thousands of Labour voters, he ousted Labour’s Arthur Blenkinsop by 98 votes.

At Westminster, Montgomery backed Sir Gerald Nabarro’s rebellion against “Schedule A” income tax for home owners; abstained on the appointment of ICI’s Dr Richard Beeching to head British Railways; accused the government of “defeatism” over plans to close lines on Tyneside; and refused to back a Bill allowing ministers to override the Burnham Committee’s decisions on teachers’ pay.

At the end of 1962, Montgomery and seven other Tories met Harold Macmillan to press for vigorous action to tackle unemployment in the north-east; not long after, Lord Hailsham was tasked with reviving the region. But further slum clearance could not offset a swing back to Labour at the 1964 election, and Geoffrey Rhodes ousted Montgomery by 1,644 votes.

He did not fight the 1966 election, but in April the next year he returned to the Commons for Brierley Hill at a by-election. Race was the most contentious issue in the West Midlands, and after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, Montgomery said that, while Powell had been reviled for making it, at least it had led to the Labour government’s doing something about immigration. In 1969 he asserted that “coloured” immigrants were “now a favoured class”, better treated than the indigenous British.

When constituencies were redrawn, he went for the new, safe, seat of South-West Staffordshire, but in 1972 lost out in the selection process to the younger Patrick Cormack. Montgomery then became candidate for the much less winnable Dudley West . When the election came in February 1974, Labour’s Colin Phipps defeated him by 4,669 votes. Montgomery decided not to stand there again, saying: “I am not a rich man, and I have to earn my living.”

Then Anthony Barber, Heath’s former Chancellor, gave up his seat at Altrincham and Sale, and Montgomery beat three recently unseated ex-ministers to the nomination. In that October’s further election, he held the seat with a majority of 6,912.

Montgomery had been PPS to Mrs Thatcher for her final months as Education Secretary, and when Airey Neave formed a team to install her in place of Heath he was an enthusiastic recruit. She rewarded Montgomery by making him her PPS once again, but in January 1976 he resigned, saying he wanted to take a more active part in education debates.

Montgomery attacked what he called the “inexplicable and disgraceful” behaviour of the Women’s Cricket Association in sacking Rachel Hayhoe-Flint as the England captain. (His wife, Joyce Biddle, had been an accomplished cricketer who had once played alongside Hayhoe-Flint.)

A lengthier campaign concerned the Moors murderer Myra Hindley. Montgomery became convinced that the authorities were letting her out of prison, asking if she was the “mystery blonde” who had appeared at a family funeral. In 1981 he applied to visit her after reports that she had had plastic surgery to change her appearance. For a decade, he urged ministers to resist pressure to grant her parole.

With Mrs Thatcher in power, Montgomery not only gave her full support but was also one of the Right-wing coterie which put her less trusted ministers under pressure to stiffen their policies. He voted to toughen James Prior’s trade union legislation, abstained on Willie Whitelaw’s relaxation of the immigration rules, and opposed making racial discrimination by a police officer an offence.

He told Mrs Thatcher the nation was “fully behind” the police over their handling of the miners’ strike, and was one of the staunchest supporters of the newspaper proprietor Eddy Shah when he took on the print unions at his Warrington plant. Labour were furious when it emerged that Montgomery had introduced Shah to Mrs Thatcher, at a reception in Altrincham to mark his 21 years as an MP.

In 1985 he and the other survivors of Mrs Thatcher’s leadership campaign organised a dinner to mark her 10th anniversary as leader, presenting her with a specially commissioned pair of Wedgwood rose bowls. He was knighted the following year.

Montgomery spent most of the Thatcher years in the political shadows, but after the 1992 election became chairman of the Committee of Selection, which allocates members to Select Committees in consultation with the whips. Two years later he was elected to the executive of the 1922 Committee.

When John Major resigned as leader in 1995 to take on the Eurosceptic Right, Montgomery was an energetic member of his successful re-election team. He was also an executive member of the British American Parliamentary Group and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, and Parliamentary consultant to the National Association of Bookmakers. He retired from Parliament at the 1997 election.